[Issue 39] Go Big or Go Home
Creating offers that over-deliver
[Photo by MP on Unsplash]
The Idea: Use the “11-star offer” exercise to bring clarity to your offer creation process.
Dive Deeper: Your offers are, it goes without saying, a crucial part of the world you create for your people to spend time in. For a deeper dive into how to approach offer creation through the lens of the Acropolis Model, go check out this article:
The Problem: Actually getting down to making new offers is a bit of a shadowy process. It often gets brushed past - on the way to confronting what feels like more pressing challenges, such as getting attention, creating content, and making sales.
When owners do give attention to the process, a few common mistakes get in people’s way:
As creators, our natural response to friction (struggles to get attention, monetize, sell, etcetera) is to simply create MORE. As if a higher volume of work alone will fix the problem. This leads to a hodgepodge of random offers, with little in the way of an intentional path between them.
During the offer creation phase, often more focus gets put on the format, design, and price of the offer than on the actual content. This creates snazzy-looking content assets, but not necessarily ones that are any different from any other ones.
The content of the offer gets less focus because creators tend to get stuck on choosing what content goes into a paid offer versus what gets put out there for free. Another mistake is associating volume with value, leading to bloated offers that do more to overwhelm people than anything.
The “11-star offer” exercise provides a way of cutting through some of this noise.
The Application: This exercise, as described by marketer Shawn Twing, is based on the 5-star rating system used for hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality destinations. (But turns it up a notch, hence the 11 stars.)
It’s simple enough to execute: for a moment, you forget about reality. About the cost, time, and logistics of delivery, etcetera. Instead, you imagine the most incredible experience you could possibly provide to a customer in the act of solving whatever problem you’re addressing.
If you were offering an 11-star experience, what would that look like? What details would you add to blow your customer away? What would they feel at every stage?
This level of experience likely isn’t physically possible for you to deliver. So the next step is to gradually back it off: remove an element here, an element there, until you land somewhere within the range of what you can actually follow through on.
This sort of sounds like you could just skip the first step: come up with some cool components and add them in.
But the effect of aiming so high with the experience you provide is that you land above where you would have otherwise.
An example of this in action:
Disney is known for the top-notch experience they provide to their resort or cruise customers. This experience comes from the numerous details - that on their own would never be noticed - that Disney has invested in getting just right.
How did they perfect their experience building process?
According to Shawn, Disney creative teams would start by kicking legal out of the room. They would brainstorm unhindered by worrying about what’s possible. Then they would bring legal back in to help dial in what could actually be accomplished.
A further example:
In college, I co-founded a campus organization. On my leadership team, I had two individuals who brought unbridled creativity to planning activities. On the other hand, my finance guy brought a sense of realism.
Serving as the bridge between these two sides helped us find a balance point where we were able to execute on big ideas. That first semester on campus, we raised more funding and put on bigger events than most new organizations because of this approach of imagining big then dialing back.
P.S. - If you try this thought experiment, let me know if it helps you come up with some unconventional ideas!